National Account Manager
I'd like to say there was a direct route to get to the job I'm now in but with the variety of options available within record companies it took me a while to decide which option to stick with. My first job in a record company came from working in a record shop and dealing with sales reps from a variety of record labels. Most companies tend to look for reps from retail as they have experience of both sales and music, I was no exception and I started as a sales representative for Island Records in 1986.
Within 18 months my career took a different direction when I was promoted to Radio Promotions Manager. I spent the next 2 years promoting Island Records artists to Radio One, Capital Radio and GLR. Another great job - you get to work with the producers and DJ's who help break artists' careers and you deal directly with the artists themselves. My next move was to leave the record business completely and take a year of to travel the world, the record business helped in this too as I got a job working for Polygram in Australia for the 6 months I was there.
Following my return to the UK I took a job at Chrysalis records, I had realised that I'd missed the selling part of the job and decided to go back to sales and became a sales rep again. I spent the next five years on the road visiting my 50 accounts weekly, getting invited to gigs, record launch parties and getting free music - what more could you want! Well there's always a desire to move forward, so moved into the office as Sales Co-ordinator - EMI had by now taken over Chrysalis so I was based at EMI's head office and the job involved dealing with both Sales and the various marketing departments within EMI. Unfortunately this career path ended abruptly when I was made redundant in 1996.
After a couple of months of looking around and thinking of changing industries completely and moving out of music, I was offered a job as National Account Manager for MCI, a budget music company based in Soho. I must admit I originally took the job as a stopgap but I soon realised that this kind of sales was what I enjoyed most. Whereas the reps job involves selling to individual stores, a National Account Manager deals with the head office of the big retail chains - everyone from HMV to Woolworth's to Tesco's and the sales volumes go from the 100's to the 10s of thousands. I did the job for a couple of years before EMI offered me a similar position with them. While I was obviously a little concerned about going back to a former employer who'd made me redundant once before, I decided that the opportunity (and the money!) was not worth passing up. So far I've been correct - I spent a year selling EMI's budget range to the larger retailers and have now been promoted to selling chart product and full price repertoire to HMV, Tower and Borders - and its the best job I've had so far!
The main aim of the job is to sell and promote all EMI releases to, amongst others, HMV - the largest specialist retailer. This is achieved by making sure that the relevant buyer is aware of the marketing campaign and promotional plot around a specific release and then using whatever other means necessary to ensure they buy lots of stock! There are many other commercial aspects of the job that need to be taken care of as well which, while not being particularly exciting, are extremely important. Taking into account all that I've done in my various jobs to date this is the most enjoyable one, it presents a lot of challenges and due to the different types of releases we deal with it is always different and makes for a very diverse working day.
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